In a world ruled by conmen and cynics, diehard joy-bringers like Valerie June feel increasingly vital. She talks to Alan Pedder about her new album Owls, Omens, and Oracles, and the songs that continue to shape her.
Valerie June was in the kitchen of her family home in Tennessee one morning, sipping the day’s first cup of tea, when she first saw the owl, sitting in a tree across the misty pond outside.
“Anything” by Adrianne Lenker
BEST FIT: Such a great choice. This song stops me in my tracks every single time.
VALERIE JUNE: It stops me in mine, too. I saw her do this song on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness!’
With Adrianne’s work, for me, it’s so much about the gentleness of the delivery and her voice, which is so unique. I love the oddness of it. I love voices that aren’t exactly polished or mainstream. I love voices that just feel honest, and Adrianne’s voice is one of those. She’s a brilliant songwriter too. If you look at the lyrics to “Anything” on paper, even just the way the words fall on the page is so beautiful. “Staring down the barrel of the hot sun / shining with the sheen of a shotgun” – I just love that. I love the way it paints a picture in your mind.
Adrianne is such a visual songwriter, and you can picture her songs almost like they are movies happening in front of you. You don’t get bored. She’s got a lot of lyrics in her songs, especially this one, and, unlike with some other people who do that, you’re never like, ‘Okay, wrap it up now.’ With Adrianne, I’m like ‘Please don’t stop. Could you do this all day?’ And sometimes I will let her do it all day. I’ll just let her play on repeat.
I love the rhythm of “Anything”, too. It’s almost like she’s rapping, you know? We live in a world where music is so integrated that I’m like, ‘Yeah, if you’re influenced by hip hop and you want to bring that into a folk song, go for it.’ And I love this song for all those reasons.
“Right Back to It” by Waxahatchee feat. MJ Lenderman
BEST FIT: Next you’ve chosen an even more recent track, which is kind of a modern take on the classic country duet. What is it that you love about this one?
VALERIE JUNE: I just want to say, I really love the music video for this track so much. And the reason that I love it is because Katie is moving through these cypress trees, which are pretty much my favourite trees besides willow trees – don’t even get me started on those – and it just takes me home.
There’s a place near Jackson, Tennessee, where I’m from, called Reelfort Lake, which is a gigantic lake that was formed by an earthquake and it’s pretty much surrounded by cypress trees. That’s where my mind goes when I hear this song and watch the video – back to the trees and to that crazy 19th century earthquake that was so powerful that the Mississippi river started running backwards and a lake was formed. Some of my favourite trees are there. Yeah, I’m a tree lover, I’ll just come out and say it. I’m all about hugging trees.
The warmth that this song gives me is not something you can get from all that many songs these days, so I really love that Waxahatchee gave that to me. I love that getting right back to it, to me, means going right back home.
The harmonies feel like a warm blanket, don’t they? And Katie Crutchfield is just so great with melodies.
Yeah, she is. The melody is absolutely amazing. I heard the song once, and then I heard it somewhere else once, and that was all it took. Now it’s stuck. And when a song gets stuck in your head like that, to the point where you’re thinking about it while lying in bed at night, then, okay, alright, that’s a good song right there.
“The Sprout & The Bean” by Joanna Newsom
BEST FIT: I know you have a thing for what you call perfectly imperfect voices, as do I, and Joanna Newsom is probably the pinnacle of perfectly imperfect voices for me. What is it that you love about her, and this song in particular?
VALERIE JUNE: She is definitely the living embodiment of a perfectly imperfect voice, and I love her. I love the way she plays the harp, and I love how she breaks the rules of how a harp can sound and of what a voice can be. She just fully and distinctively does her own thing, and that’s just beautiful to me in this world were so many things are similar or comparable. So I love her in general for that.
Lyrically, this song is just so magical. Joanna is a spell weaver, to me. When you listen to her music, she’s not just singing a song, she’s bringing in all this nature, all this magic, all this whimsicalness. I love that she’s an adult who says it’s okay to dive into being playful. The way she sings that line “Should we go outside? / Should we break some bread?” – it’s like something you might say to a friend when you’re a kid. I love that she’s not afraid to be an adult with a child-like sensibility.
The Milk-Eyed Mender is one of those albums where you always remember the first time you heard it. And I knew it at the start, back in the early 2000s. I listened and was like, ‘Oh my god, I will never forget this.’
I remember my first time hearing it exactly. My partner at the time came into the room covering his ears saying, ‘What the fuck is this?’ – “It’s my new favourite album!”
Right? You either love it or you don’t love it, and I definitely have friends who are like, ‘Turn that off! I cannot listen to that.’ Well, I’m about to turn it up and make you listen to it, on repeat.
“Katie Cruel” by Karen Dalton
BEST FIT: I guess there must be some people who would say the same about Karen Dalton. You’ve chosen “Katie Cruel”, a classic folk song that’s been recorded by hundreds of people. What is it that you love about Karen and her version of this?
VALERIE JUNE: It’s the same thing as with Joanna, only much earlier, because Karen came in with the Greenwich Village scene of the ’60s and ‘70s, along with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and all those other people who would play there in the coffee shops, sharing songs and performing at open mics.
I love the authenticity of her voice, and I chose “Katie Cruel” because she’s taken that song, a song that’s been sung by so many others, and totally made it her own. For me, if you can take a song that’s traditional and has been passed through so many generations by so many different people, and you can sing it in a way that no one will ever forget your version, that is just so powerful.
When I think about the lyrics to “Katie Cruel”, my favourite lines would be “When I first came to town, they brought me drinks of plenty / Now they've changed their tune and hand me the bottles empty.” I think she’s able to convey that feeling of things turning cold with the blues in her voice. The tone of her voice, and the way her voice breaks, feels so, so honest. She’s not trying to sound like anything or anyone other than herself and it leaves me feeling so heartbroken.
How did Karen Dalton's music come into your life?
Through a friend from high school who came across my music one day. It’s funny, because I didn’t do music in high school so everyone I went to high school with was pretty shocked that I became a musician. They were like, “What? Where did that come from?” I always sang at home as a kid but I never learned to play an instrument until my early 20s. So when I started to do music and the word was getting around the town, this guy from high school heard me and was like, “Oh my god, you have got to hear Karen Dalton! There are not many people you remind me of, but definitely her.”
So I went and listened, and listened again, and I couldn't stop. I listened to everything she did, which of course is not really all that much. It breaks my heart sometimes when I get to the end of her recorded work. I’m like, “Please come back to me, I need you! I need more.” But, you know, maybe these particular voices that are kind of odd, not so smooth and perfect but perfectly imperfect, maybe they’re not necessarily meant to do tonnes and tonnes of records, or to leave us more than they do. They’ve left us what they’ve left us, and we just have to appreciate it.
“Enlightenment” by Sun Ra
BEST FIT: Going from people who don't have much recorded work to someone who has a mind-bogglingly huge amount, let's talk about Sun Ra. The song you’ve chosen is “Enlightenment”, so I have to ask whether you prefer the original instrumental from Jazz in Silhouette or the later version with June Tyson on vocals?
VALERIE JUNE: The instrumental one is the one that I'm thinking of.
I remember I got in my brother’s car one day when he was taking me to the airport and he was listening to some instrumental music on the radio. I was like, “What’s going on? Is everything okay? Why are we listening to this show?” and he said, “Sometimes I just don’t want to hear what anybody else is thinking. I don’t want to hear their opinions about anything: how they feel, how they lost someone, how they love someone. I don’t want to know. I just want to listen to some music.” And I feel like that about the instrumental version of Sun Ra’s “Enlightenment”.
He left us a lot, as you said, and he even left us books. One of my favourite things is his book, The Immeasurable Equation. You have got to get that book if you have never read it. It’s so good. It’s a bunch of poems that he wrote, but they are written in a way that feels to me like equations. It’s hard to explain but when you get it, you’ll see.
But the thing that I really enjoy about having this song on the playlist is that we need this pause. We need the pause of having no words. I love lyrics, as you know. Pretty much the only thing I’ve been talking about with these songs is lyrics. But we don’t always need to have them. I love this song as well because of what we talked about earlier, in that a recording of a song is not necessarily the absolute final thing. That’s why I don’t get as stressed when I’m going to make a record, because there is a version of “Enlightenment” with lyrics, you know?
You can always go back if you want to, and you can capture new versions. Songs carry many different forms, so I love that about this song. I also love the title, because, even just on a spiritual level, having those few minutes to breathe and not hear anyone else’s words allows you to open your personal mind up and have an enlightened moment while you’re listening.
I love that, but I do also like the first lyric in the June Tyson version, which is a chant that goes “The sound of joy is enlightenment,” and I feel that could almost be a manifesto for some of your music.
Yeah? I mean, in some ways, definitely, that could be connecting with what I’m doing, so I really appreciate that compliment. Thank you. I’ll take it!
“I Must Be In A Good Place Now” by Bobby Charles
VALERIE JUNE: We’ve spoken about artists who, like Karen Dalton, don't leave us a lot, and Bobby Charles did not leave us a lot. But he did leave us a record that’s just called Bobby Charles, and I think it’s one that everybody needs to have. Everybody needs to go get that record right now, because it’s got some of the best songwriting I’ve ever heard. I love the gentleness of his voice, and how kind of straightforward the lyrics are. There’s a blues and a longing in his songs that’s similar to what I hear when I listen to someone like Townes van Zandt. I hear a sadness and a longing, and it totally moves me in a very authentic way.
He really paints a picture with his words, too. From the very beginning of “I Must Be in a Good Place Now”, he’s singing things like “Wild apple trees are blooming all around / Sunshine coming through, a rainbow covered sky,” and it’s really a poem, you know? There's butterflies, there's rainbows, there's yesterdays, there's tomorrows. It's so raw, so emotional, and I think that’s something that the other songs I’ve chosen – the ones with lyrics and voices – have in common. They have this raw emotion that gets inside every organ of your body, goes to where anything is torn, and immediately start to patch it up and hear it. And that’s what this song by Bobby Charles does.
BEST FIT: It is a really lovely song. I’m not particularly sappy but I will admit that I did melt a tiny bit at the way he sings the line, “I saw a butterfly and I named it after you.” Like, come on, it's too cute.
Yeah! I do ask myself, what could the man have done more than what he did on this record? It’s just so great, and I honestly don’t know if he could have done more because he gave it his all. And maybe that's how it’s sometimes got to be. Like, we don't need any more of Karen Dalton or Bobby Charles because they already gave us everything. They dropped it right there. Some artists need many records to do what they did in just a few.
"Cosmic Dancer" by T. Rex
BEST FIT: Let's move on to “Cosmic Dancer” by T. Rex, which you covered back in 2019. What is it that you love about this one?
VALERIE JUNE: Oh, my goodness, this song is the life cycle that I live, period. Like, don't we all? That's how we get in and that's how we get out. I mean, before he was born, this fool was dancing. Yes, he was, and we all are.
I sometimes get to thinking about the philosophy that you can find in a rock and roll song. Some of the best doctors and scientists of philosophy are musicians, right? And this song is so philosophical. Marc Bolan should have been granted a Harvard degree in philosophy because this song is next level with what it does to the physical, to the metaphysical, to the astral. He nailed it. He goes through the ages of the dance, and he goes before and beyond life. You can just see yourself in it, you know?
I love that he's also not afraid to play. It’s not that serious. To be a philosopher, a truth teller, or an oracle, it’s not so serious. He goes to this place in the song where’s he sings, “What’s it like to be a loon? I liken it to a balloon.” He’s like, “Lighten up, fool,” and I love that. And I love the music. I love how it is just so unforgivingly swirling rock and roll.
I rock a lot in my music, so I’m heavily influenced by T Rex for sure. I was always listening to the classic rock station on the radio in Humboldt, Tennessee, discovering all these masters of philosophy in song. There are so many. To me, Black Sabbath and Van Morrison are too.
"Cry Baby" by Sunny War feat. Valerie June
BEST FIT: Next we’ve got “Cry Baby” by Sunny War, featuring yourself, which just came out recently on her album, Armageddon in a Summer Dress. I love that she actually wrote this song with you in mind.
VALERIE JUNE: Yeah, Sunny is so sunny. She’s so great. She was supporting some shows I had and she told me after soundcheck one day, “Oh, I wrote a song and I had you in mind when I did it.” I think maybe two years went by before she asked me to sing on it, and of course I was like, “Absolutely!”
It’s interesting because she wrote “Cry Baby” after seeing me on stage, night after night, talking and singing about joy, positivity, love, choosing light, and choosing paths of evolved states of being vs. staying in places where we can be divisive and polarised, and kind of building a hatred toward one another. But it does make me think sometimes, do people think I don’t cry? Because you cannot do what I do, in terms of my message and what I share with people, and not cry. I mean, the intensity of my tears is something I can’t even really get into fully with you, on a phone call. That’s why it’s great that it’s a song, because a song is something that a person can feel and they know.
When I cry, the intensity of my tears carries all the ancestry that I have as a Black woman, and all the things that my people have been through. When we look at the levels of being, at all the status and the privilege in the world, my lineage is probably at the lowest level, at the bottom, and what that looks like… we understand pain. We understand loss. We understand brutality, and we understand horrors beyond what most people can even think of. We carry all that inside us. The lynchings, the rapes, the murders, the constant pushback.
So when I choose to not be focused in that direction, I have to go through a whole process of crying to get to my joy. I have to grieve all of that, and then after I’ve had my cry baby moment, I’m ready. I’m like, ‘Okay, now what we gonna do? We’re gonna keep doing that? No, that is not what we’re going to keep doing. We can do something beautiful. That’s what we’re going to do, because we can.”
It's a way of tapping into the darkness as the owl would teach, and transforming that darkness like an alchemist into something more positive. We don’t have to sit in the tears. We can experience the tears. We can feel them fully, and we can allow them to guide us into a different space. A healthier, more positive space. That’s why I love singing this song, because it’s necessary to be in the mud, to get that soil all over you and be muddy and filthy and crying and lost, and then it’s also necessary to move to joy – to “Joy, Joy!”
“It's Not Easy” by Ofege
VALERIE JUNE: This song is my favourite one to go to right now, because it's new in my life. Of course, I should have known about this song when I went to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of 19 in search of music, like Fela Kuti and stuff. But I didn't. I didn't know. I only found out about this song right before I made this list. It just happened to pop into my life and I was immediately like, “This song hasto be on this list.”
Now I'm going down a rabbit hole of Nigerian psych-rock music. As you know, I love all that stuff in general: psych-rock, classic rock, every kind of rock. So to know that these young teenage Black kids in Africa were making rock music like this, yes, I’m all about it.
The same goes for Sun Ra, because he was an Afrofuturist, as people say. You know, of all the African American writers, there aren’t many who write about the future – probably the best-known book like that is Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. What Afrofuturism does is it opens and expands the consciousness of what’s possible for Black artists, because there’s a very limited perception sometimes. But we’re so not monolithic, we are so vast, and we do so much. Even within one record I do so much, and people don’t always get it. But I think it’s allowed and it has been happening for a long time.
I love the surprises that I get in Africa. I was in Kenya last year and I went to a lot of record shops in Nairobi, and to the markets looking for records, and it was so surprising to me that there were these big country music sections. I spoke to the owner of one record shop who said that people there want to hear country music more than any other genre. He said, “I don’t like country music, but I sell it. I have a whole wall of it.”
African music surprises me all the time, with all the different genres that people are into and the different music that they are playing, and I love how influenced we all are by each other. I love how integrated the world is in that way, and the way in which music is always bringing people together. It’s such a huge space for connectedness and for belonging. Music is a huge space for community, and it’s so great that we have that. I love it so much.
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